Rogue Wave (21 page)

Automatically, she shook off the memory. Then she smiled. She had driven the Great Highway several times each year, every year since Rosten left. Those dunes had always triggered the same memory, and the memory had led to surges of fury. But this time the thought of Marc Rosten didn’t anger her, not since she had raided his office and read that autopsy report. Not since she’d won a round.

She and Rosten had never played games, even at parties. Early on they’d realized they were both too unwilling to lose. But unless he had mellowed, she thought, this game wasn’t over yet.

She came to the end of the Great Highway, pulled across the street and parked. On impulse, she scrambled into the back of the Jeep, extricated her running shoes from her bag and pulled them on. Then she walked across the street and up onto the top of the dunes. The fog had thickened, settling in around the dunes, covering the water, muting the sounds of traffic. What had Delaney felt out there on the last trip of his life, he who was not a sailor? Had the thirty-foot waves panicked him? Had he grabbed for a bottle he’d avoided for years? Had he slipped and banged his head, sustained that single bruise, and fallen overboard? Or had he looked at Robin Matucci and realized he was going to die?

But why? Why would Robin Matucci have run down Garrett Brant? And what would have induced her to jettison her beloved boat—and her life—just to murder her deckhand?

In the few minutes Kiernan had been standing on the dunes, the fog had congealed into heavy mist, as San Franciscans would call it. Anywhere else, it would be called rain. Rain that was doing her green wool businesswoman suit no good at all. She hurried down the slope, half running, half slaloming in the wet sand. By the time she got to the car the “mist” had soaked into her jacket and her hair was dripping.

It would have been more impressive to arrive at Dwyer Cummings’s house dry, but so be it. Given what she had to ask him, he wasn’t going to be pleased anyway. She climbed into the Jeep, turned on the engine, and sat shivering until the heater blew out warm air.

The Forest Hill section of the city where Cummings lived was a twenty-minute drive from the Great Highway. It was one of San Francisco’s most exclusive districts, an area where finding a parking spot did not in itself signal a banner day. She pulled up in front of Cummings’s house, toweled off her hair and penciled on eyeliner, a hint of shadow and a brush of blush. The effect, she noted, was not what it would have been before she’d seen Garrett Brant and Carlos Delaney, but it was better than nothing.

She walked up the stone-slab path to Cummings’s house, only five minutes late, pressed the bell, and stood under the portico, listening to the mist splat on the walkway stones.

The house was not outstanding for the neighborhood. A large beige stucco rectangle with portico pillars guarding the door and Spanish tile work around the windows, it was an appealing mixture of exotic and homey. The single yellow rectangle of light in a downstairs window was a good sign. More lights might have meant more people, interruptions, and avenues of escape for the Energy Producers’ Group spokesman. A single light on the second floor would have suggested a timer.

Cummings sure was taking his time to make the twenty-foot walk from the light to the door. He was supposedly expecting her. And even if he’d forgotten, it wasn’t yet six-thirty. He should still be in decent enough shape to make it across the living room. She pressed the bell again. Olsen had described Dwyer Cummings as a company man, bright, single-minded. “Don’t let that folksy charm snow you.”

The man who opened the door was a six-foot blond.

“Dwyer Cummings?” Kiernan asked.

Someone not assessing the man might have missed the momentary hesitation before he smiled and said, “You’re the investigator?” His voice had the same easy welcome she recalled from the radio debate she’d heard driving up to the city.

“Right. Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”

“Sure. Come on in. You’re getting soaked out there.” Cummings smiled easily. His hair was styled to the side now and seemed to have been finger-combed recently, possibly the cause of his delayed arrival at the door. Cornflower-blue eyes were set over wide, flat cheeks. It was a face that said “relax, trust me.” Which, Kiernan realized, made her suspicious. He could have been the social director of the second best fraternity on campus—twenty-five well-preserved years later—welcoming an assistant dean for his annual inspection, hoping he didn’t find what?

Kiernan followed him into a living room that ran the width of the house. The decanter sat on a round table between two leather chairs. He motioned her to one, settled into the other and said, “Drink?”

“Thanks.”

“Scotch okay?”

“Fine.”

“Water? Soda?”

“Water.”

His hand was steady as he poured. He added a dash of water to his own glass, brow tensing as he flicked the pitcher back up to stop the diluting effect. It made her think of her uncle Amon, taking her aside when she was too young to care and explaining in studied seriousness how to mix a highball. “Kerry, lass,” he’d said, slurring his sibilants, “after you stir the rye and soda always add a dash of rye on the top. Gives you that good taste of strength right off.”

Cummings saluted her with his glass, but seemed careful not to drink until she had. It was good Scotch, and she felt the heat of it flow down her spine. She said, “I heard you Monday on the radio. You handled it well.”

He leaned back and crossed his legs. “I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not easy debating that woman. It’s like fending off a pack of hounds. You toss a stick and while you’re watching one race after it, another’s got its teeth in your ankle.”

Kiernan couldn’t suppress a grin at the accuracy of his observation. “From what I hear. Prop. Thirty-Seven is still up for grabs.”

He smiled. “I take that as a testament to the good sense of northern Californians.”

“And to your own handling of the campaign?”

He shrugged. “Hardest market in the country. Out here they’re all environmentalists, even if they’ve never seen an unpaved street. You talk about offshore drilling and they think one end of the pipe’s in the well and the other opens directly into the ocean. I’ll tell you, Kiernan, it’s been a challenge to make people realize that tanker accidents like the
Valdez
in Alaska have no more to do with oil platforms than steers do with steering wheels. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have to explain that in offshore drilling we don’t use tankers, we pipe the oil from the platform to our onshore facilities.”

“Not if Prop. Thirty-Seven passes, and you can’t get the zoning changes, sewer permits and roads built to allow you to
have
onshore facilities.”

He stiffened. “Hey, you sure you’re not Leporek in sheep’s clothing?” Glancing at her green wool suit, his eyes came to rest at the hem, which ended on her thigh. “Or should I say, fox’s clothing?”

It was a tacky comment. What was it Hartoonian had said? A problem with the bottle. Didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, but he wasn’t a thief.

Cummings finished his drink, held his glass up questioningly, and when she declined a refill, stood to make his own. With his back to her he said, “You’re here about Robin. What have you unearthed about her death?”

No preamble, no words of regret, no movement to pour the Scotch or add fresh ice while he asked the question to which his nervousness was linked. Kiernan said, “We don’t know that she’s dead.”

His hand stopped midair. It was a moment before he said, “Really? How could she have survived? It’d be a miracle.” The words were enthusiastic but the voice was wary. That was rating as the normal reaction.

“You probably didn’t realize this, but you were her most frequent passenger. Did you know her from Alaska?”

“Yeah.” Now he eased several ice cubes into his glass. “Robin was a great captain. Once you went out with her, she had a lot of loyalty and she made a point of being accommodating.”

“How so?”

“Not what you think!”

“I don’t think anything, Mr. Cummings.”

Cummings stared at his drink.

She let a moment pass before asking, “Did you arrange the fishing parties?”

He nodded and sat back down.

“Business parties?”

Again he nodded warily.

“You work for the Energy Producers’ Group now, right?”

“I’m on loan,” he muttered.

Three years. A long-term loan. “So the parties you brought on board were from more than one oil company?”

He jerked his head up. “What does that have to do with Robin’s boat sinking? It’s not as if we sunk it!”

Very jumpy, Kiernan thought. “No. But I thought you might have some clue about malfunctioning. You’re an engineer, aren’t you? The men you brought aboard were engineers.”

“We’re not all engineers. And even those of us who trained as engineers are likely to be pretty far removed from the slide rule. Besides, we were busy dealing with salmon or albacore or rock cod; we weren’t down below fixing the engine. At two hundred bucks a day per guest, you don’t spend your time covered in grease.” He stared at his glass a moment, and when he put it down the lines of anger in his face had eased. “These trips are called tax trips. Perfectly legal. We bring guys from different companies together, let them get comfortable with each other so they can cooperate on projects. We could bring them in cold and hope they’d all think alike—that’s the way it used to be done. But you can imagine that doesn’t work most of the time. Everyone’s used to being in charge. They don’t want someone else telling them what to do. Or they’re married to one way of doing things and they’d leave the oil under the surface before they’d consider another way of exploring. If you go into a project cold these guys are all sharp edges, all unknown quantities.”

“And if they’re indiscreet, it’s not where anyone will overhear, right?” Anyone except Delaney with his wire. But Delaney had been investigating Robin, not the oil men.

He shrugged. “But if you got these same guys together on a volleyball court—”

“Or a fishing expedition?”

“Right. They’re all buddies when they’re pulling in thirty-pound steelheads.”

“As long as they’re
all
pulling them in?”

He raised his glass to her.

“So to ensure that you went with Robin?”

“Right.”

He shifted in his chair. “Look, the election is less than a week away. I’ve got enough work to keep me up till two. Could you get to the point?”

“You knew Robin from Alaska. From the California Tavern?”

“Right.”

“Did you ever run across a guy named Garrett Brant there? An artist.”

“Artist? No. Closest I came to art or artists was the paintings in the conference rooms. But plenty of guys passed through the bar without shaking my hand.” He glanced at his nearly empty glass but didn’t freshen it.

Kiernan surveyed her remaining questions and went with the most pressing. “What about Robin’s deckhand, Carlos Delaney? Was he with her in Alaska?”

“She didn’t have deckhands in Alaska. She
was
a hand there.”

“Was Delaney there?”

“Not as I remember.”

“Up there you were in administration?”

“Probability Analysis, Marine Division Project Coordinator.”

“That means chances of things going wrong?”

“That means running tests beforehand to make sure things
don’t
go wrong.”

Kiernan took a swallow of Scotch. “That’s quite different from the media spokesman’s job you have here.”

“Look, I agreed to talk about Robin, I didn’t—”

“A memo was stolen from your office up there. Then you were transferred down here. What happened?”

“I don’t know where you heard—”

“A theft. You were transferred, so you were involved. But you weren’t fired, just gotten out of the way, just warned.

You—”

He slammed the glass on his knee. Ice cubes jumped. “Leporek! Of course, she’s been feeding you these lies. A week before the election, and she’s running scared.”

Ignoring his outburst, Kiernan said, “If you’d been an innocent victim, no one would have bothered you, would they?”

Cummings’s mouth tightened.

“Unless you had a reputation for indiscretion.”

“I don’t. Do you think the Energy Producers’ Group would choose someone unreliable to represent the entire industry?”

If they didn’t expect the job to become as important as it had; if they couldn’t replace their spokesman without nudging the opposition to wonder why. “What was in that memo?”

“Out! Just get out of here. And you blab this slander to the press you’ll see a lawsuit that will make your ass twirl.”

“What, Dwyer? You ran tests to make sure things don’t go wrong. Something did go wrong, right? What was it?”

“Nothing went wrong. Our tests are monitored. There’s nothing that happened that I could have hidden.”

Cummings was clearly so relieved to be able to give that answer that she believed him. And believed she was on the wrong track. “Still, that memo was enough to get you transferred. It was—”

He dropped the glass, grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet, wrenching her around on the three-inch stiletto heels. She glanced down at his foot and drove her heel into it. He yelped.

“Don’t try that again,” she said as she walked to the door.

I
T WAS TWENTY TO
eight when Kiernan stopped at the top of Dixie Alley. She pulled her soggy jacket tighter around her and ran down the stairs, hoping to find Olsen seated at his dining-room table staring at the lights across the Bay in Oakland. She wanted to see him eating pizza, drinking a beer, looking so comfortable that it would take all her control not to kick the man.

She ran through the gate and up the stairs.

The apartment was still dark.

She knocked.

No answer.

Rain battered against the glass doors. Inside Olsen’s, nothing had changed since yesterday. The flashlight-lit rooms still showed no signs of conflict. The coffee mug was still on the table, as if he’d stepped out for a minute instead of a day.